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Recently, Alfonso Cuarón was awarded best foreign language film and best director at the Golden Globes for Roma. He is fittingly being praised for both technical features and the powerful stories Roma tells about daily life in Mexico in the 1970s.

The film, however, contains other subtle but important elements that have been largely ignored by critics so far.

Two of these elements are Mexico’s political context in the early 1970s and the ongoing conditions that have characterized domestic workers’ lives since. The main character of Roma is Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), a domestic worker based on a woman named Liboria Rodríguez (known as Libo) who worked for Cuarón’s family when he was a child.

Who Were Los Halcones?

Cuarón situates Roma’s characters amid significant historical events: the fight of some Mexicans for social progress and their opposition to a political, authoritarian regime that worked to maintain its privileges through various means.

One of these means is exemplified in the film by the character Fermín—Cleo’s boyfriend (played by Jorge Antonio Guerrero) who belongs to the paramilitary group Los Halcones (The Hawks).

We know now by various direct sources and United States government declassified documents that high-ranking Mexican government officials secretly organized, financed, trained and armed various groups, including Los Halcones, to help quash social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Los Halcones were composed of around 2,000 young men, aged 18 to 29, distributed in squads of 200 members each.

An Attack on Mexican Democracy

In Roma, Cleo and others pass these demonstrators on their way to a furniture store. They also pass, in a depiction of real life, a long row of riot police trucks and idle police officers, while Halcones patiently wait at the corner.

Masculinity and Violence

Fermín belongs to the second-tier group of Los Halcones. In the hotel, he confesses to Cleo: “I owe my life to martial arts [to Halcones]. I grew up with nothing, you know?”

Portraying the real Halcones youth, Fermín’s participation offered him certain social mobility but only in exchange for committing atrocities.

Some young men’s allegiance to Los Halcones and their corrupt decisions were thus mediated by class aspirations, ideology and violence.

Los Halcones’ violence also manifested in gender violence. This is depicted in Roma when Fermín dismisses his paternity and threatens to beat Cleo and their unborn daughter if she insists on looking for him.

In 2010, 58 percent of Indigenous women in the Monterrey Metropolitan Area were domestic workers. Many migrated from the countryside to the city. This means that, as Indigenous migration researcher Séverine Durin asserts, domestic work is strongly shaped by ethnicity.

It is not a coincidence then, that Cuarón’s former nanny Libo or the characters Cleo and Adela in Roma are (young) Indigenous women.

Disadvantageous Labor Conditions

Only as recently as December 2018, the Mexican Supreme Court determined that it is unconstitutional for employers to deny domestic workers access to social security, meaning mainly access to public health services.

Domestic workers with children also need to make extraordinary arrangements for their own children to be taken care of, meaning prolonged separation many times while they take care of other families’ children. Their caring and affection not only become commodified, but also dislocated.

Not Really Part of the Family

Some employers consider domestic workers as “part of the family.” However, uneven power relations, class differentials, discrimination and racism make them not really part of the family.

Cuarón mentioned that he was forced to recognize several decades later, and only after he started working on Roma, that Libo was, first, a woman, and second, an Indigenous woman. He then realized that Libo belongs to a “world of affective needs, a world of sexual desires,” and also to “a more dispossessed group, a world of injustice.”

In Roma, the family members are unaware of the domestic workers’ social and personal lives.

When Cleo is taken to the delivery room, the grandmother, Teresa, is asked by a nurse about Cleo’s second last name, her date of birth and if she has insurance. But Teresa cannot answer those questions.

Cleo picks up after the family dog’s, feeds the family, prepares the kids for school, puts them to bed, washes and irons the family’s clothes and cleans the house. Still, the grandmother ignores everything about Cleo despite living in the “same” house (usually, domestic workers sleep and even eat apart from the family).

Cleo is “part of the family” but she is not really part of the family.

Daily Violence

Overall, Roma contains various stories that subtly unveil different forms of violence: poverty, social exclusion and gender-based violence promoted by sexist and misogynistic forms of masculinity.

Moreover, domestic workers’ quiet but endless work, which in Roma takes over half of the film, hinders uneven power relations mediated by class, gender, age, affection, ethnicity, race and the urban/rural divide.

These factors intersect to maintain domestic workers, mainly (Indigenous) women, in subordinate positions. They are conveniently imagined as “part of the family,” but they are never really part of the family, neither in Mexico, nor in Canada, nor anywhere else in the world.